Haven Kimmel was raised in Mooreland, Indiana, the focus of her bestselling memoirs, A Girl Named Zippy: Growing up Small in Mooreland, Indiana (2001) and She Got Up Off the Couch: And Other Heroic Acts From Mooreland, Indiana (2005).

Kimmel earned her undergraduate degree in English and creative writing from Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana and a graduate degree from North Carolina State University, where she studied with novelist Lee Smith. She also attended seminary at the Earlham School of Religion in Richmond, Ind. She lives in Chapel Hill, NC.

Haven Kimmel was a poet prior to writing a memoir of her early childhood. The Solace of Leaving Early (2002) and Something Rising (Light and Swift) (2004) are the first two novels in Kimmel's "trilogy of place" about fictional Hopwood County, Ind. The third book, released in September 2007, is titled The Used World. Her other works include a poetic children's picture book, Orville: A Dog Story (2003), a humorous middle grade book, Kaline Klattermaster's Tree House (2008) and the haunting and hallucinatory novel, Iodine (2008).

The event is free and open to the public.